Perhaps not British though? A friend of mine (Australian) works in a company with offices in the UK and US selling education/health website software. In Aus and the US, business works as expected, you go in, make your case, get an answer yes/no and you're golden. In the UK they were finding that a great many places would agree to buy and then default at the next step.
They eventually learned to do the initial sell in a much more sideways manner as when confronted with 'do you want this or not?', British clients tended to just say yes to get them out of the office - even if they had zero intention of taking the product. Caused a lot of confusion until that was identified.
It depends. For example Swedes are very talkative, but Finns not the least bit. Finns are very direct and generally do not engage in small talk. Linus comes from Swedish speaking minority of Finland, so I guess that he is more talkative than an average Finn. Extensive stay abroad helps too. Still I wouldn't be surprised if he slightly hated twaddling :)
It might also be a european thing. We are more direct. Less talking around the issue at hand.